An All-Out Push for Kamala Harris

By Fierce Contributor | November 30, 2019

A collection of black women are
forming a sister circle around the lone black woman Democratic candidate. Can
they sustain her through Iowa and South Carolina?

(EDITOR’S
NOTE: On Dec. 3, Sen. Kamala Harris of California announced that she was suspending
her bid for the 2020 Democratic nomination for president. Click
here to read an updated version of this story, which includes Harris announcement
and chronicles the late November push by black women to build support for her
in Iowa and South Carolina.)

By Sonya Ross

Black
Women Unmuted

The morning
after the Democratic debate at Tyler Perry’s glittering new film studio, Kamala
Harris stepped onto a different stage elsewhere in Atlanta, took off the gloves
and took on “the donkey in the room.”

Seated
against a backdrop of colorful “Black Women for Kamala” posters, Harris gazed
out at dozens of black women, some of them elected officials, assembled for
breakfast. She told them with all honesty that she knows some voters — many of
them black — think they should back a “safe” Democrat for president instead of
her.

Their
rationale, Harris said, is this: The need to oust Republican President Donald
Trump, and tamp down the racism he fans, is too great to risk putting a black
woman atop the Democratic ticket. Even post-Obama, America is not ready for
that.

Harris assured the crowd that she is the best option for defeating Trump. She believes this so
much that she refers to the presidency in terms of “she” and
“her.” With a quick sweep of her hand to tuck her hair behind her
ear, Harris pointed out that this is not a new fight. Black women typically are
met with the “not ready” rap when they step up to break a barrier.

“One of the
most powerful tools for a president of the United States … is when she holds
this microphone,” Harris said. “With it comes the ability to change perception
about so many things, including who can do what and what that looks like.”

Harris may
be the only black woman among Democratic presidential contenders, but she is
hardly out there by herself. A coterie of black women have emerged at Harris’
side to blunt her critics and curry support for her among black women. After
the Atlanta debate, they launched an all-out push for Harris, operating off a
feeling that Harris is backed by more black women than she’s getting credit
for.

“We’re not
scared; we’re not confused,” Rep. Brenda Lawrence, a Michigan Democrat, said
Saturday during a black women’s town hall for
Harris in South Carolina. “We’re very clear that she is the
woman for the job.”

Support from
the sisters, crowned “the backbone” of the Democratic Party, is a big deal.
Every Democrat polling ahead of Harris realizes it is virtually impossible to
win without black women’s votes. They are pursuing, and in some cases getting,
black girl loyalty, too.

“The road to
the White House and the road to 2020 is powered by us, right? But this time,
we’re demanding a return on our voting investment,” said Glynda Carr, president
and CEO of Higher Heights, the black women’s political advocacy group that has endorsed
Harris.

The public support
organized by Higher Heights comes as Harris is pushing a giant rock up a steep
hill. She desperately needs to win, or show, in Iowa’s Feb. 3 caucuses. Polls
consistently place her behind former Vice President Joe Biden, her fellow U.S.
Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, and a surging South Bend, Ind.,
Mayor Pete Buttigieg, whose support among black voters is minuscule at best.

On top of
that, Harris’ campaign has been pocked by internal strife. Fundraising has been
tough. Introducing herself to Iowa voters is more challenging for her than
others, Harris explained, because the necessary TV ads cost more money than she
can spare.

“There’s a
candidate who came into the race with $10 million. That’s called start-up
capital. I don’t have that kind of capital.”

Harris’
struggles echo those experienced in 1972 by Democrat Shirley Chisholm, the
first black woman to seek the presidential nomination of a major political
party.

Chisholm
also had trouble raising money and got less visibility than white male
candidates. She, too, felt “the need to walk a tight rope of being perceived as
‘strong’ but not ‘difficult’ in getting her message across to the voters,” said
Columbia University political science professor Fredrick Harris (no relation to
the candidate), director of the university’s Center on African American
Politics and Society.

“We know
that Shirley Chisholm had a difficult time during her 1972 presidential run,
and Carol Moseley Braun had challenges during her short-lived campaign in
2004,” Harris said. “We should expect no different from Kamala Harris.”

Shirley Chisholm was unbought and unbossed, paving the way for Black women to lead, run—and win. On her birthday, we celebrate her life and legacy. pic.twitter.com/eRBZS2xV6X

Harris’ woes
are exacerbated by whispers that gnaw at her credibility with black voters:
Kamala locked up black people as a prosecutor. She is indifferent to the pain
of mass incarceration among black men.

“It breaks
my heart,” Harris said. “Are we saying that, when people have an ability to
make a decision about who will be charged with a crime, … we don’t want it to
be someone who comes from the same community? To reform systems, we’ve got to
be everywhere. So, that’s the choice I made.”

Harris has a
theory about why those whispers persist. Russian intervention in the 2016
election showed Americans are wildly susceptible to racist narratives, she
said, and the purveyors of those distortions are at it again for 2020.

“My campaign
has often been the number one target of Russian bots,” Harris said. “We
have to figure out ways to remind folks to not get played.”

Paraphrasing
the late Coretta Scott King’s observation that the fight for racial progress
starts over with each generation, Harris urged her supporters at the Atlanta
breakfast to be encouraged about her prospects.

“Instead of
throwing up our hands, let’s roll up our sleeves. We cannot ever, as a people,
afford to sit back and think everything is going to be OK.”

To that end,
longtime Georgia state Rep. Mable Thomas, an Atlanta Democrat, stood and
identified a handful of other elected officials in the room. Thomas asked
Harris whether she would be willing to “fight for and in Georgia” for
Democrats, because the people she named were willing to mobilize voters for the
California senator.

“We are on
the ground,” Thomas said. “We can actually help you win
Georgia.”

“Yes, yes,
yes yes,” Harris replied. “I intend to be a president who comes back to help
you build up the state party.”

As soon as
she took the stage at the Saturday town hall at Benedict College, Harris handed
a folder to Trav Robertson, chair of the South Carolina Democratic Party.
Inside, she said, was the paperwork for her official filing for the state’s
Feb. 29 primary. As he accepted the folder,
Robertson called it “a historic moment.”

“I’m out
early for Sen. Kamala Harris, OK?” said actress Sheryl Lee Ralph, moderator of
the forum. “We do not care this weekend if you are white, black, red, yellow,
any mixed colors. We want you to vote like a black woman.”

After the
Atlanta event on Thursday, Higher Heights threw a fundraiser for Harris in
Harlem. That same day, Harris picked up an endorsement from Rep. Stacey
Plaskett of the Virgin Islands, bringing to 11 the number of endorsements that
Harris has secured from Congressional Black Caucus members.

“All things
being equal, I’m going with the sister,” Rep. Marcia Fudge, D-Ohio, told
the breakfast audience. “If we support her, she will win. Don’t ever let
anybody tell you she cannot win. And don’t listen to polls because if the polls
were right, I would not be sitting here now.”

Before
rushing back to Washington for a meeting about a congressional report on voter
suppression, Fudge dismissed the knocks against Harris’ prosecutorial record as
a red herring promulgated by people seeking a reason to reject her.

“I was
a prosecutor. Nobody ever mentions it,” Fudge said. “I put people in
jail, too. But I helped a lot of people stay out of jail, too, as did she. … We
judge more harshly people who look like us than we do anyone else. It is time
to be fair.”

Harris
herself set the wheels for this sisterly exuberance in motion during Wednesday
night’s debate. She called out the Democratic Party for
neglecting black voters until “it’s, you know, close to election time.”
She said it is hypocritical to applaud black women for the strong turnout that
undergirded Democratic electoral gains in 2017 and 2018, then ignore their
policy needs.

“When black
women are three to four times more likely to die in connection with childbirth
in America, when the sons of black women will die because of gun violence more
than any other cause of death, when black women make 61 cents on the dollar as
compared to all women who tragically make 80 cents on the dollar,” Harris
said, “the question has to be, ‘Where you been, and what are you going to
do? And do you understand who the people are?’”

Biden went
on the defensive. He ran down a list of his black supporters — and promptly
misspoke by identifying Braun as the only black woman elected to the Senate.

“That’s not
true,” Harris replied. “The other one is here.”

Biden
swiftly sought to fix the faux pas, saying: “No, I said the first. I said the
first African-American woman.”

The moment
stuck, however, and underscored a point black women have been making for years
about Democrats’ benign neglect of their loyalty. Hearing that neglect
explained eloquently by a black woman during a nationally televised debate drew
sighs of relief.

“That was
one of my favorite parts of the night for sure,” Fatima Goss Graves, president
and CEO of the National Women’s Law Center, said during a Facebook Live debate
recap hosted by the United State of Women.

“We can flip this a little bit and put black women at the
center of the conversation,” Goss Graves said. “I would love to see what it
would look like to put black women at the center, identify an agenda that
actually would meet their needs, and then talk about how you’re going to fill
your cabinet and key posts with black women and other women of color. It would
be interesting to think in a different way for once.”

Melissa
Watson, co-chair of Harris’ South Carolina campaign, recalled how black voters
in her state turned the tide for Obama more than a decade ago, and dared the
audience to believe they can do the same for Harris next year.

“This isn’t
our first rodeo,” Watson said. “Even though people are erasing us, people are
saying our candidate shouldn’t be on stage, people are saying she’s down in the
polls, you have the courage to vote anyway.

“Donate
anyway,” Watson continued. “Show up anyway. Find a neighbor anyway. Go to
church anyway. Stand up for Kamala anyway. And on Feb. 29th, 2020,
we’re going to make history and the entire world will hear us.”

Sonya Ross is editor-in-chief of Black Women Unmuted. A former White House correspondent, she has covered national politics as a reporter and editor for more than 25 years.

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